João Lencastre's Communion - Unlimited Dreams (2021)

João Lencastre’s Communion project had different band formats in the past usually combining musicians from Portugal and the United States. For the first time it became an octet with some of the best musicians of the Lisbon scene (Ricardo Toscano, André Fernandes, Pedro Branco, João Hasselberg and Nelson Cascais), plus Albert Cirera and Benny Lackner. Lencastre says that this 8-piece group provided him the possibility to show more of his musical self, and that makes sense, considering that he composes with the piano and plays the drumkit, the two most orchestral of instruments. A band with two saxophones, two electric guitars, two basses (one of them electric), piano, drums and electronics make his composer dreams unlimited. This means to deal with form, namely the formal aspects presented by the musical genres he loves as jazz, rock, metal, electronica, reggae, afrobeat and also the challenges those genres introduce in terms of contents. He does it always in non-obvious ways, but they’re essential to understand his writing and the collective performances. One more pearl for his discography.